Monday, October 23, 2006
Iraq is not Vietnam, nor is it a quagmire
But the end is nigh for the Iraqi war - at least for our involvement.
by Ferdinand III
It is hard to understand the collective consciousness of a fragmented civilization that self-flagellates at every hard step taken in a long war. In the annals of warfare Iraq and Afghanistan are small, and comparatively cheap attempts to defang a fascism as deadly, utopian and anti-modern as any warring pagan construct previously created. The war on terror is a war against fascist Islam. It will last at least a generation. Yet a few thousand men are lost and suddenly the will of entire countries evaporates, questionings turn into screams of despair and intelligent debate devolves into how to surrender.
Consider the absurdity of what is going on. Arabs, terrorists and Islamic fascists butcher innocents; howl with rage over any and all ‘slights’; invade Europe and North America through moronic immigration systems; demand ‘tolerance’ even as they try to stifle debate, free speech and intimidate the media and political class; and via the multi-cult club try to change our society from within through a cultural and demographic revolution. Yet our reaction is to try to treat out of uniform combatants in civil courts, demand apologies from Danish papers for badly drawn cartoons, force Burger King to remove its swirl logo in the UK; and ensure that Islam is tolerated through state funded schools, mosques and various ‘associations’ that try to teach us what a wonderful and peaceful faith it really is. It is truly hard to take such a civilization seriously.
Or at least elements of it. The Americans will no doubt choose the leftist-Marxists, ‘one-world’-do gooders and anti-war activists to lead their 2 houses come November. Pity. We need the opposite. Prosecuting and winning wars requires leaders that take the ‘bit between their teeth’, to paraphrase Churchill, and who are not be afraid of destroying their enemy. We in the West cry over every death, whip ourselves into fetal positions over any setback, and allow ourselves to play into the hands of the enemy by falsely stating that all is bad, we are losing the war, and that Islam is peaceful and that the Iraqi conflict is to blame for an upsurge in Islamic violence.
The blindingly dumb logic embedded in any of these sentiments should give everyone pause who believes that the ‘left’ in the West want to win as much as the so-called ‘right’. They don’t. And this is why in the coming years we will have more setbacks than we have today including more death. By not fighting the war responsibly with enough troops, enough grit and overwhelming force we have allowed our enemies to regroup, use our media to their advantage and weaken our domestic resolve – all to ensure a more bloody future. Remember Hitler and the 1936 illegal reoccupation of the Rhineland?
The ‘Iraqi war-is-like-Vietnam’ line indicates the point. There are absolutely no similarities between the 2 conflicts. Geography, ideology, type of combatants, arms being used, popular support for guerillas, the numbers of troops involved – all are different. In Vietnam the communists fought a guerilla war using conventional techniques. Millions of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were in uniform, in large military formations, taking over tracts of land and assaulting US positions using conventional and guerilla tactics, in a densely forested jungle landscape. None of that applies to Iraq. In Iraq the terrorists have little popular support, are fighting an urban campaign of terror using non-conventional munitions and have no other political-social construct to offer the inhabitants other than a return to a terror state or a Wahabbi extremist Islamocracy.
Yet you hear the opposite and it is getting annoying. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman recently claimed that the October increase in terror attacks in Iraq during Ramadan is magically akin to the failed Tet offensive of 1968 in South Vietnam. The Tet offensive ended in a remarkable failure for the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies. While the Americans lost 980 men killed in the offensive the communists lost 25.000. North Vietnamese generals afterwards acknowledged that they had lost this offensive and the military campaign of the war. Switch now to Iraq. During the past month in Iraq 73 US troops have died and though the exact number of terrorists killed is not known it is probably in the 15 or 20:1 ratio. In other words close to 1000 enemy lie dead. Yet TV cameras and whining editorials only highlight the 73 US dead. Biased? You bet. Anything to discredit the war is being used, including idiotic comparisons of 2 conflicts that have nothing in common.
According to the National Review, in August 2006 there was a web posting by a Najd al-Rawi of the ‘Global Islamic Media Front’ entitled "The Global Media: A Work Paper for Invading the US Media.” Part of this plan is to re-engage the Western media in tales of ‘another Vietnam’. This is something the jihadists are expert in doing – playing the ‘useful idiots’ in the western media and elite by creating false claims, analogies and linkages. It reminds me of Churchill during World War II who enjoyed reading transcripts of German radio propaganda announcing the fictitious destruction of many times more British planes and ships than were actually sunk and declaring that the war was unwinnable for the British. It today’s world the media would dutifully repeat these lies to a confused public.
In the 1974 midterm elections the anti-Vietnam elements of the Democratic party took power in both houses. Their first act was to pass the ‘Foreign Assistance Act’ which stopped aid to South Vietnam ensuring that the communists would win the war in 1975. After winning militarily the Americans lost the war politically.
Don’t think this will happen in Iraq? Think again. The end might be nigh for George Bush’s tough but necessary war.